Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 78-07(E), Section: A.

Advisers: Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore; Ned Blackhawk.

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This study unravels the threads binding four generations of social reformers, missionaries, philanthropists, activists, and teachers who, since the eighteenth century, used schooling to reconcile the founding cataclysms of the United States---the ongoing presence of Indigenous nations, free black people, and non-white immigrants. During the interwar period in the twentieth century, a pedagogical forged among formerly enslaved African American and captive American Indian students at Hampton Institute in Virginia became integral to British Indirect Rule in colonial Africa and Oceania, eventually circling back to the United States to form the backbone of American Indian education policy during the New Deal. This colonial genealogy of American education offers a substantially different interpretation of twentieth century education and activism.

The different kinds or rights, discipline, and security African Americans and Native Americans experienced in the United States ultimately brought both groups together on reservations after Brown v Board of Education. Between 1954 and 1974, southern resistance to desegregation displaced an estimated forty thousand African Americans from teaching positions. At the same time, an increased commitment to civil rights on the federal level combined with an unprecedented expansion in Indian education to open new opportunities for African Americans in Indian Service. BIA officials, urgently in need of teachers, developed a recruitment policy targeting African Americans. Offering civil rights protections to beleaguered black teachers in exchange for their participation in eliminating Native sovereignty through assimilation, the U.S. government reaped a harvest sown through its own unwillingness to enforce the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and exert federal sovereignty upon southern states. African American educators, meanwhile, became participants in the settler colonial project even as they continued to organize resistance against white supremacy and mounted appeals for universal human rights from new homes in Indian Country, while American Indian nations embarked upon their own campaigns for self-determination.

African Americans > Study and teaching.

African Americans > History.

Black people > History.

United States > History.